When you embrace cringe, you create courage.
On the opposite side of hiding is hope.
“Learn to live alongside cringe. No matter how hard you try to avoid being cringe you will look back on your life and cringe retrospectively.” — Taylor Swift
Many of us spend our whole lives hiding and often without even knowing what from. We hide from what we want because we are afraid we won’t get it. We hide from who we are because sometimes we feel like we aren’t enough and others we feel like we’re too much.
We hide from mistakes because we don’t want to suffer any consequences and in doing so we end up making the worst mistake of all — abandoning ourselves to earn the acceptance of others, stripping our free will out of the fear of failure, and trading lives of expansive courage for ones of stifling comfort.
Living courageously means living authentically. It’s showing up exactly as you are without cutting out the parts you think are unsavory, without building walls around your shame and hoping no one notices. It’s recognizing that not everyone will like what you like — not everyone will like you — but that becomes okay the minute you accept yourself.
Authenticity comes at a cost and that cost is cringe, or the acute embarrassment we can experience when we look back at who we once were and it no…
